Posts Tagged ‘Arlington Passive House’

With a slightly heavy heart, we are here to announce that the Arlington Passivhaus is on the market. The blog will continue because we are still going to be testing and monitoring this home’s performance while the home is on the market and will continue to report our findings.

We will also continue to hold tours for anyone who is interested in learning about the Passivhaus and how to actually build one.

This is not the “end of an era” but we want to drop a quick “Thank You” to all our readers, advisors, advocates, neighbors, friends, family, the Arlington County, the Passiv House community and everyone who had a role in making this project possible for their support up to now. We will continue to need it as we move forward.

Like this:

Note: Previously posted on FB page on June 3, 2011. Migrated to wordpress to maintain completeness of our journal.

After receiving permits last month, the construction of the Arlington Passive House started today! Today, the work was to put build up the area that will eventually become the garage by backfilling and compacting some of the dirt that was taken out. Sounds silly but trust me, we had to do it.

Piles of Dirt

A bobcat was used to carefully dump the dirt back in. After each 8 inch lift and after the organic matters and large chunks were removed, the excavators used a remote-controlled compactor to temp down the dirt. The thing is basically a gigantic remote controlled car. Eric and I wanted to play…

Compactor

After each lift is compacted, a geotechnical engineer used some sort of nuclear seismic testing thingy (I swear, there was a radioactive sign) to test the density, moisture and bearing strength of our dirt. The dirt was compacted to 95% with less than 13% moisture and the bearing strength exceeding 3000 psi. I am not sure what that means other than a few weeks from now, we can set a crane on it to set our foundation walls. After 8 hours of backfilling, compacting and testing, we have a nice flat platform to work with. Also, much of the 6ft tall dirt mounts are gone.